When a competitor is described as “on fire”, the usual meaning is metaphorical. Unfortunately, Dan Cammish was literally so on the first day of the 2022 British Touring Car Championship, when his car caught ablaze. And since then, his season had merely smouldered and almost blown out. But last weekend at Thruxton, Cammish and his Motorbase Performance-run, NAPA-liveried Ford Focus ST were unstoppable. The former nearly-man who’d become something of a nowhere man is now the man.
He was the man in a sporting sense too. Cammish’s travails this year meant he arrived at Thruxton a lowly 12th in the points, with team-mate Ash Sutton embroiled in a four-way fight for the title. The Yorkshireman inched himself up to 11th with victory in the first race, then he gifted Sutton honours in the second to maximise the three-time champion’s chances of a fourth crown. “When you need a team-mate, DanCam is the man for it,” acknowledged a magnanimous Sutton in the immediate aftermath after leading a 1-2 for the Fords.
Such a performance was exactly what jovial Motorbase principal Pete Osborne had in mind when he signed Sutton and Cammish last winter in what was widely hailed as a NAPA superteam. The trouble is, the team had struggled to get consistency out of the Focus, with Sutton’s neck-wringing approach perhaps better mitigating the shortfalls. But progress was made in the Snetterton test in July, before Sutton was the only challenger to the dominant BMWs at Knockhill.
